Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, May 21, 2007

Woman killed in Sderot rocket attack

YNet reports that Sderot residents' luck finally ran out. A woman was killed in her car and a man injured.

Will we finally see Israel killing Hamas leaders?

There have been 10 rockets today.

Time to break out the playing cards

In a nod to the famous playing cards that the US Army gave its soldiers when looking for Saddam's top henchmen, Ma'ariv published their own facsimiles of cards representing the major terrorists that Israel may have on its list for assassination.

(Of course, the Arab newspaper that published this took it seriously.)

Morning roundup

Another PalArab who was shot during the "unfortunate events" died - after the imperialistic Israelis failed to save him in the Zionist hospital he was transfered to. The PalArab self-death count for the year climbs to 263.

2 Hamas members were critically injured from more unfortunate gunfire during the "truce." (Perhaps when Israel is doing the shooting, it is "fortunate?" )

At least 3 Qassams this morning towards the western Negev. (JPost: 4.)

Paltoday reports that some members of Knesset from Labor, Likud and Kadima suggest compensating Sderot residents retroactively from the time of disengagement from taxes collected for the PA that Israel has been withholding. An excellent idea, although all terror victims should be able to get compensated from that ever growing fund. The idea that Israel is still bound by all the agreements it made with an entity that continuously tries to kill and kidnap her citizens is ludicrous.

UPDATE: One of the Hamas members shot this morning has died. Fatah denied it had anything to do with it so the fiction of the cease fire remains. 264.

UPDATE 2: A 17-year old youth was killed when a "mysterious object" he was holding exploded in Rafah. 265.

The religion of peace

From the Jerusalem Post:

According to sources close to the two parties, several mosques in the West Bank and Gaza Strip witnessed fistfights and screaming matches over the past few days between Hamas and Fatah supporters.
The same preachers who until recently were attacking Israel, the Jews and the "Crusaders" in the US and Europe, have now shifted their anger toward PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction.
According to PA security sources, some of the Hamas-affiliated preachers exploited Friday prayers to call for the killing of Fatah political leaders and security commanders. In many cases, worshipers walked out of the mosques in protest against what they described as "incitement." The sources claimed that Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal was kicked out of a mosque near Damascus after worshipers held him responsible for the internecine fighting in the Gaza Strip.
Fatah spokesmen accused Hamas of exploiting the mosques to launch a wave of incitement against their leaders.
"This is not the first time Hamas has used the mosques to call for killing Palestinians," said Jamal Nazzal, a Fatah representative in the West Bank. "We must put an end to the incitement in the mosques."
Fatah officials are particularly enraged by the harsh rhetoric that many preachers have begun using when referring to the Hamas-Fatah clashes. These preachers are calling the PA security forces the "Lahad Army," a reference to the former pro-Israel South Lebanon Army headed by Gen. Antoine Lahad.
The preachers have also been denouncing Abbas and his top aides in Fatah as a bunch of corrupt infidels who are conspiring with the US and Israel against Islam.
The tension reached its peak on Friday, when thousands of worshipers stormed out of mosques after the preachers launched scathing attacks on Fatah.
In the town of Deir el-Balah in the southern Gaza Strip, preacher Maher Huli was forced to run away from a local mosque after being attacked by dozens of worshipers.
Huli enraged many mosque-goers after declaring that all the PA and Fatah members who were killed in the clashes with Hamas would "end up in hell." He also claimed that Fatah and Israel had been jointly bombing the Hamas-controlled Islamic University in Gaza City.
Hamas militiamen who rushed to the scene assaulted a number of worshipers and fired into the air to disperse the angry crowd.
A similar incident occurred in another mosque in the town, where preacher Ahmed Nakla was also forced to flee the mosque after being attacked by worshipers. In his sermon, Nakla had called for killing members of the PA security forces under the pretext that they were implementing a "Zionist-American plot to eliminate Hamas."
The worst incident took place in the Beersheva Mosque in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood of Gaza City, where at least five people were wounded in a melee that erupted after the preacher accused Fatah leaders of high treason.
Witnesses quoted the Hamas preacher as saying that some of the Fatah leaders were "not even fit to serve as shoe shiners." The remarks were directed especially against Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Azzam and PA National Security Adviser Muhammad Dahlan.

Sounds like houses of worship in any religion. No difference at all.

A Psychological History of Palestinian Arabs - Part 1

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8
Part 9
Part 10
Part 11
Part 12
Part 13

Understanding history is difficult unless one understands the psyches of the major players in history. This applies not only to individuals but to groups as well. Members of relatively homogeneous groups tend to think similarly and knowing how they think is a critical piece of the puzzle in understanding how they act.

Unfortunately, historians generally do not put primary emphasis on the state of mind of the subjects of their histories. Events are listed and discussed but not the psychology of the people involved. There are a number of reasons for this: historians are trained to deal with facts and to discount conjecture, and there is no greater conjecture than to guess how someone thinks. The reluctance to look at history through this prism is perhaps also due to an understandable reluctance to place entire groups of people into a single bucket, as this seems to be too close to racism. Paradoxically, today's Western mindset where the disgust of racism is paramount may be hurting the understanding of the mindsets of other cultures and historical periods.

In starting this series of posts, I am engaging in some hubris. I am not a historian, nor a psychologist, nor a demographer, nor a sociologist, and I'm not even a professional writer. To make matters worse, I do have biases that I freely admit. Even with these shortcomings, I hope that I can contribute in a small way to the understanding of today's issues revolving around the Arab-Israeli conflict. Especially in this case, there is really no dividing line between history and current events, and too much history glibly assumes that all people think the same way - an error that has great ramifications in our time as well.

In the wake of the 1948 birth of the state of Israel came the creation of a wholly new people, known today as "Palestinians." They became a people as a result of a confluence of events that, in the end, brought them together and gave them a shared identity. This essay will attempt to show how these Arabs who originally came from all over the Middle East ended up perceiving themselves as a separate people, how their Arab mindset became the specifically Palestinian Arab mindset, and ultimately how the Palestinian Arabs became who they are today.

One other note: leaders of societies do not necessarily reflect the thinking of their people, and the Palestinian Arabs have had many leaders who acted in ways that were counterproductive to their people as a whole. This essay is not as concerned with the psychology of the leaders nearly as much as with the Palestinian Arabs themselves, as a group.

----
The Arab psyche in the early days of the Zionist movement

The psychology of the Arabs of Palestine in the decades before Israel's founding is indistinguishable from that of all Arabs. This is because, to the Arabs, Palestine was just another Arab district in the larger Arab world, usually associated with southern Syria. While the Arab world was hardly unified, from the average Arab man's viewpoint there was little difference between one area and another, except for some minor cultural differences.

We can divide the major components of the Arab psyche into three major groups, each of which include some corollaries and subgroups. The major groups are Honor/Shame, Community and Unity, and Islam.

Honor/Shame
The most important and overriding component of the Arab psyche is that of honor, and its flip-side of shame. Although there is some controversy about this, I posit that there is nothing inherently better or worse in an honor/shame culture versus the "guilt" culture that typifies the Western psyche. The emotions of shame or guilt can be constructive or destructive depending on how the individual deals with it. And outside circumstances can accentuate and amplify these attributes. People in the Far East exhibit the same honor/shame viewpoint although they exhibit it somewhat differently than Arabs do.

In brief, in an honor/shame society, more emphasis is placed on how the individual is perceived by others rather than how he views himself. The appearance of wrongdoing is far more upsetting than actual wrongdoing, and the respect of others is more prized than self-respect.

Honor/shame can be divided into two complementary components: seeking honor and avoiding shame.

The idea of honor as a positive incentive is critically important. The Arab man in the early 20^th century, as with the Arab men in previous centuries, aspired as individuals to be honorable, and in a part of the world where there was little chance for real social or political advancement, this desire would be concentrated on the idea of raising a family honorably. The basic requirement of supporting a family is to make money.

The disincentive of shame is spoken about much more nowadays than in the past, as the phenomena of so-called "honor killings" get some measure of publicity. The fear of being shamed predates Islam and has always been a very powerful concept.

Almost every other major feature of the Arab mindset in general, and the Palestinian Arab mindset in particular, can be traced back to understanding the overwhelming importance the Arab people ascribe to honor and shame. But there are others that need to be understood.

Community and unity
Like other peoples, Arabs build and take pride in their communities. But through the first half of the twentieth century, they did not feel as much allegiance to their individual countries as they did towards the Arab "nation" as a whole. This is understandable as national boundaries were somewhat arbitrarily decided by the West and were ignored when possible.

The commonality that Arabs throughout the region had dwarfed any possible differences. Most shared the same religion, all spoke the same language, almost all shared a distrust of outsiders and particularly Westerners. Not that there weren't conflicts within the Arab world but on a personal level the differences were quite small.

Ties to a particular region were somewhat tenuous. When the need arose, Arabs were not reluctant to move elsewhere. Perhaps it was the influence of the Bedouins but the Arabs have been historically much more nomadic within the sphere of Arabia than most other peoples. In those times, Arabism was a much stronger tie between people than Islam was.

Islam
While there were many Christian and Jewish Arabs, the vast majority have been Muslim, and the relationship between Islam and the Arab world has been a two-way street. Islam itself has been very influenced by Arab customs (such as women covering their faces, which is mentioned as an Arab habit in the Talmud that predates Islam) but Arab culture and thinking have likewise been influenced by Islam. It is difficult to know which influences the other more. Examples of Arab cultural habits that probably at least partly a result of Islam would include charity, misogyny and a level of supremacy.

Each of the three main categories include other aspects of personality and mindsets.

The Honor/Shame mentality spawns an entire host of feelings and potential actions. One of the corollaries to Arab pride and sense of honor is the importance of manliness. Masculinity is functionally equivalent to honor in the Arab world, as honor is all about how one appears and not so much about how one thinks. The man is the breadwinner of his household, the defender of his people, the public face of his family and the leader of his community. Aggressiveness is an attribute of masculinity but it is not a necessity to prove oneself through aggression. It can be exhibited through macho posturing but this is by no means a necessity. Quietly supporting one's family is also an attribute of manliness. Unfortunately, misogyny is often a result of this attribute as well.

Conversely, the fear of being emasculated is a strong component of the Arab psyche.

Another possible outcome of the honor/shame mentality is dishonesty. In cases where telling the truth can cause disgrace, it is preferable to lie. The incentive to lie increases with how high a position one occupies because any mistake he makes could cause a commensurate amount of disgrace.

Another aspect of the Palestinian Arab personality that can be ascribed to honor is itinerancy. Arabs tended to wander from place to place within the Arab nation. The purpose would usually be financial, and quite justified - to be able to make enough money to raise a family in an honorable fashion. For most of the history of the Middle East one can find Arabs migrating from place to place, and even after the Western world imposed semi-arbitrary borders they would be ignored.

One of the famous Arab attributes that come from their sense of community and unity is that of hospitality. Within the Arabian sphere, all likely guests were, in a sense, family. Any Arab traveling to any other village or area could rightfully expect to be treated as an honored guest. This attribute would be extended to strangers as well, and while the Arab world on a political level was highly sensitive about Western influence, individual travelers from the West seem to have been treated generally well.

Arab Anti-semitism has many possible sources, but for now we will assume the influence of Islam. Arab anti-semitism has historically been of a fundamentally different type than Christian Jew-hatred. Notwithstanding the Damascus blood libel of 1840, for the most part Muslims and Arabs are correct when they say that Jews lived in relative peace under Arab rule. However, living in peace is not the same as living as equals. The tolerance of Jews in Arab nations was salted with contempt. Even so, overt anti-semitism was relatively rare before the 20th century, and some argue that the influence of Christians in Arab lands accelerated these ideas.

In Islam, dhimmis (Christians and Jews) are second-class citizens, forced to pay allegiance and taxes to their Muslim masters. Islam looks upon itself as building upon and improving Christianity and Judaism. Dhimmis may live in Muslim lands but they may not display conspicuous religious symbols; they may not use church bells or blow shofars in public, or even to build or expand churches or synagogues in many circumstances. The punishment for murder of a dhimmi was rarely equivalent to that of a Muslim, and dhimmis could be executed for blasphemy.

So while there was not the same overt hatred towards Jews than Christian Europe exhibited too many times, the clear mindset of Muslim Arabs as the 20th century dawned was that Jews and Christians were beneath them.

Islamic supremacy was a difficult position to maintain in the early 1900s. The Western world had dominated the Islamic world militarily, culturally and scientifically since the Muslim defeat in 1683 at Vienna. Colonialism had already been encroaching on the edges of the Arab world since the 18th century and Europe was dividing up the Islamic world after the collapse of the Ottoman empire. The Islamic idea of a global 'Ummah had steadily deteriorated from the heights of the 15th and 16th centuries to a mere dream after World War I. So while the Muslims may have privately felt that Christians were just as low as Jews, in fact they maintained a healthy fear and respect for Christians who had beaten them. And their sense of being shamed by the Westerners so thoroughly translated into a hate that could not be acted upon without losing even more control.

But there were still Jews who seemed to still accept their dhimmi status in the Islamic world, and the fact that the Christian "ummah" seemed to hate them even more than the Arabs did made the Arabs think that at least they are not on the very bottom of the international food chain.

There are two other layers of the Arab psyche that need to be understood. They are hardly unique to Arabs but, in combination with the other characteristics we described, they are important to understand.

The first is projection. Everyone tends to think that others think as they do, and the West is at least as guilty of this mistake as anyone else. In this case, we are dealing with the Arabs assuming that the West is similar to them - in unity, in cohesiveness, in religiosity, and in hate. We see this today, with Arab (and other) Islamists referring to the entire Western world as "crusaders" and their conviction that everyone is working in concert against them.

The second is lack of sophistication. Although the American-run universities in the Arab world since the 19th century made a dent in how the Arab intelligentsia thought, the vast majority of Arabs were not well educated and especially not aware of other ways of thinking. As a result, any event or rumor could set off a mob mentality (the "Arab street") that would be impossible to control with logic.

Given this background, we can now begin to understand the Arab reaction to Zionism from its founding until the birth of Israel.

(It took a while to write Part 1 so don't expect Part 2 very soon, but I wanted to get this posted.)

A short note on airline security

I'm taking a flight today and decided to double-check on ID requirements. I saw an interesting section on ID requirements for children aged 15-17 traveling alone:

Driver's License
Passport
Credit card
School ID
Company ID
Library card
Birth Certificate
Social Security card
Organization ID (such as athletic club, etc.)
Proof of auto insurance in passenger's name

As we've seen in Israel and elsewhere, terrorists can be below 18 years old.

How hard is it to forge a library card or student ID?

"Human rights" roundup - none for Sderot residents

As of this morning, there is not a word on the Human Rights Watch website nor on the Amnesty International website about terror rockets being shot indiscriminately at Sderot's citizens.

Nor does the anti-war International Action Center have anything to say.

The only "human rights" organization that I could find that does condemn those rockets is Btselem.

Speaking of "human rights," there is an NGO in Israel itself called the Arab Association of Human Rights. Its purpose is to advocate for Israeli Arab human rights in Israel proper, which is a fine and worthy goal. Its English website is here.

When one enters its Arabic-language website, however, "human rights" becomes the furthest thing from its mind. Almost every article is about the 59th anniversary of the "Naqba." For Israeli Arabs, the "naqba" was just trading British dhimmi rule with Jewish dhimmi rule - it wa

s hardly a catastrophe, and they live in better conditions that any other Arabs in the Middle East. But the AAHR is trying mightily to incite Israeli Arabs against the State of Israel itself. This is clear from a photo on the front page shown here: a smiling presentation of a framed map where Israel does not exist between leaders of this group meeting in Nazareth last weekend.

The entire Arabic website is not advocating peace - it is nothing but incitement. Here are the results of a poll (Arabic only!), showing the types of people it is attracting:

How must the Palestinians inside Israel to revive Israel's Independence Day?
*Commemorating the day like other Israelis being citizens in Israel
*Ignoring celebrations and lack of participation by
*Remember Catastrophe and participate in activities that contribute to the marches and visits to villages deserted.

Not surprisingly, of the peaceful human rights advocates who visit this Arabic site, 87% want Israeli Arabs to consider the establishment of their nation as a catastrophe.

And, of course, this organization is registered with the same Israeli government that it is inciting against.

Muslims rioting at sacrilegious behavior!

Just joking:

On the streets of Gaza, members of the pro-Fatah National Security Forces were staffing checkpoints at which they made women lift their veils, worn for religious reasons of modesty. They also took away men with beards, which are often associated with members and supporters of Hamas. Those scenes have shocked many local Palestinians.

But it was reported by the crack MSM NYT - in paragraph 23 of its story.

Do we even need to mention what kind of reaction would occur if any Westerner would do the same thing?

The death of Oslo

James Taranto at Best of the Web Today makes a very good point:

With civil war raging in Gaza, an Associated Press dispatch includes this interesting observation:
Hamas mounted accusations on its Web sites, radio and TV that Abbas-linked forces were working with Israel--a charge dismissed as "absurd" by a Fatah spokesman.
Yasser Arafat is in stable condition after dying at a Paris hospital, and Mahmoud Abbas is his successor as head of the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah political/terrorist movement. Fatah says it's "absurd" that it would be working with Israel against the terrorists of Hamas--but that of course was the entire point of the Oslo accords. It's a sad little postscript to President Clinton's peace efforts.

People keep forgetting that the PA promised to stop terror as a condition of Israel withdrawing from territory. Now they still have the territory and the terror.

Updates

To keep up with the latest on the Qassam barrages and the Israeli reactions, check out Israellycool and The Muqata who are liveblogging. Israel Matzav, as usual, provides terrific analysis.

This morning a Qassam hit a gas station in Sderot.

A "high ranking IDF officer" says that Israeli actions have reduced the number of Qassams. Based on my counts, this pronouncement seems premature - at least 11 so far today.

Israel has killed 9 Palestinian terrorists so far in retaliation - and no civilians.

Ma'an News in Arabic is referring to these corpses as "martyrs." And Ma'an is by far the closest PalArabs have to real journalism. Goes to show how thoroughly messed up they are.

UPDATE: Hamas and Fatah each scored one, so our PalArab self-death count is now at 260 for the year.

UPDATE 2: A fisherman was killed in Gaza crossfire. 261.

UPDATE 3: A woman died of her wounds from the "unfortunate events." 262.

Hamas hurls the greatest insult possible to Fatah

In the Al-Qassam Hamas website in Arabic (autotranslated):

Pictures of a number of martyrs who Aleksameen Ela risen to at the hands of Zionists and the Zionists followers from the security apparatus proxy

They are showing the pictures of their dead terrorist member "martyrs" - and saying that the ones killed by Fatah were killed by a proxy for the Zionists.

The picture of the dead guy in the lower left is a nice touch.

Image is everything

From Ma'an:

Gaza – Ma'an – Unidentified gunmen opened fire on Thursday towards a rally organized in Gaza City by the leftist PFLP and DFLP movements. The Popular Front and the Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine were protesting the ongoing confrontations between Hamas and Fatah.

The two groups called on the rivals to respect the Mecca agreement, and to remove gunmen from the streets. Before the rally, several leaders of both factions gathered in the Unknown Soldier square in Gaza City.

They held President Abbas and Prime Minister Haniyeh responsible for the latest deterioration.
A leader in the PFLP, Kayid Al-Ghoul warned in a statement of new rounds of confrontations. He described the insistence of the rivals in continuing to fight each other as "shameful and harmful to the Palestinian image".

Palestinian Arabs are killing each other, an anti-war rally gets shot at, and the worst thing that the critic can say is that it is "harmful to the Palestinian image"?

It actually makes sense.

In a society where honor is prized above all and disgrace is worse than death, it follows naturally that real people dying is not an issue - but the shame that accompanies the fact that they are killed by their own people is a big deal.

Westerners need to have this hammered into our heads - we are talking about a culture that is utterly different from the one we are used to. If death at the hands of the West is honorable, then the way to dissuade them from acting like animals is not to kill them but to shame them. And the best way to shame them is to publicize the depraved acts that they do and try to cover up.

Organizations like MEMRI and PMW , by accurately publicizing the worst parts of Arab society, shame those societies. Being honest about calling them terrorists and not "freedom fighters" or "gunmen" shames them. Telling the world about honor killings and terror worship and anti-semitism and historical revisionism that is practiced by the Arab world is what the West needs to do, in plain language. The entire reason that the Palestinian Arabs keep using euphemisms in English for terror and depravity is to pre-empt the shame that they know themselves would accompany the publicizing of what they are doing, day in and day out.

The way to win the war against Islamic terror is to force them to play on the playing field of real morality and shining the light of truth on their sick and twisted priorities. And if they are so convinced that their morality is superior to ours, that suicide bombings and honor killings and targeting civilians is noble, force them to say it proudly in English.

They won't - because deep down they know that their actions are shameful and they need to desperately hide and obfuscate this fact.

Not a good week for human rights organizations

For the 23rd consecutive week, more Palestinian Arabs have been violently killed by other PalArabs than by the IDF.

This week's score wasn't even close - 49 to 6 (from PCHR.)

Even so, the "Palestinian Center for Human Rights" spends more effort and energy documenting, in the most minute detail, every perceived Israeli violation of what they call "international law" and all but ignoring the real problems that real Palestinian Arabs have, worrying about being shot by their neighbors.

Apparently "human rights" don't apply when the oppressor is not a Jew.

Similarly, another "human rights" organization, Doctors without Borders, is embarrassed this morning that one of their members was caught in a plot to assassinate Israeli leaders:

A Palestinian from the Gaza Strip who works for the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders has been arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) revealed Thursday.
Mazab Bashir, 25, from Deir el-Balah began working with Doctors Without Borders five years ago.
On April 19, he confessed during a Shin Bet interrogation that for months, he had been collecting intelligence on senior Israeli officials - including Olmert and a number of Knesset members.
Bashir met with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in September 2006, and said that the assassination was meant to avenge the deaths of Palestinian civilians.
Bashir also underwent arms training with the PFLP, and was picked to carry out the planned assassination.
He told the Shin Bet that he had collected information on the Internet to use to target MKs, but then realized that the MKs in question did not live in Jerusalem, the only Israeli city to which his permit granted him access.
According to the officials, after he realized that the security surrounding Olmert was impenetrable, Bashir decided in December 2006 to kill David Be'eri, head of the Elad organization, a group involved in purchasing Arab homes in Jerusalem's Old City.
That same month, he underwent combat training in the Gaza Strip in order to learn to kill without using weapons.
In January 2007, Bashir again entered Israel again on behalf of Doctors Without Borders, and began collecting information on Be'eri. He made additional trips to Jerusalem in February and March, and on April 18. He was arrested on April 19.
During his interrogation, Bashir said he had planned to return to Gaza to complete his combat training and learn, among other things, how to break necks. He said he intended to use his skills to kill Be'eri....
Duncan Mclean, head of 'Doctors Without Borders' in the region, told Israel Radio, "I don't think embarrassed would be the right word. We are very sad for Bashir who has been working for us for almost six years. But we would like to make it very clear that we make a distinction between his professional work and what he does on his personal time in the sense that all our staff is hired for professional reasons and I don't think our organization can be held liable for every aspect of their life."

As Jameel points out,

If a humanitarian-medical organization would say that about Dr. Baruch Goldstein, don't you think they would immediatly lose their legitimacy in the eyes of the world (and media), yet they can say that about Mazab Bashir?

Also, this is just another reminder of how Palestinian terrorists use "medicine" as a cover, be it smuggling terrorists, bombs and weapons in ambualnces, or inflitrating Doctors without Borders...

As of this morning, the Doctors Without Borders website doesn't bother to mention this little incident.

SDEROT, ISRAEL: An Israeli fire fighter inspect the damage to a school following an attack by Palestinian militants with home-made rrockets on a school in the southern Israeli town of Sderot, a few kms away from the Palestinian Gaza Strip, 17 May 2007. JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images)

Just a little reminder for those who like to say that Qassams are homemade, ineffective weapons.

Arab media reporting Israeli tanks in Gaza

Both Ma'an and Paltoday have bulletins saying Israeli tanks have entered Gaza for the first time since the withdrawal. Paltoday (Arabic) says they are in Jabalia.

IMEMC says a guard at the Islamic University was shot and killed by a sniper. Our 2007 PalArab self-death count rises to 249.

UPDATE: Terrorist died from wounds yesterday in Gaza hospital. 250.

Wafa reported 47 killed in the infighting before the one above which is exactly my number. They also report 210 injured and 28 in critical condition.

UPDATE 2: Ynet reports 1 killed during PalArab funeral; man and woman killed in Fatah/Hamas shootings. 253.

UPDATE 3: AP's Ibrahim Barzak, the guy who described how scary the violence was yesterday, is back in form spending more time on Israeli airstrikes than PalArab violence today. But he claims 22 were killed yesterday, I only had 18, so I am adjusting my count to 257.

UPDATE 4: Hamas blew up a Fatah terrorist. 258.